there’s no Eden anyway
I am living now in this detached and marginal position in life. I’ve woken up and found myself in this world that somehow I never really understood, never really belonged to and yet participated in, in good faith and even protected by the ignorance I mentioned before, the innocence maybe, following my own path while for a long time staying acceptably, by virtue of patronage and intelligence, within—until a certain point of rupture—the acceptable pathway. But never knowingly treading that particular road. And so that double path, one path innocently followed that for a long time was on the same route as the prescribed path allowed me to misunderstand the nature of the two paths.
And then at a certain moment, by the fact of some act of refusal, protest, desperation and exhaustion—courage as well—finding myself or being left only with a lonelier divergent path from which after a sufficient period of time it was possible to get sufficient distance to then have this eerie, disturbing experience of sensing the hidden psychology and purposes and programmings of the life that, while I was surrounded by it thinking it was my own, I couldn’t see. And then when I was far enough away to see that it wasn’t my own still there was this chilling sense of surprise and weird recognition of the strangeness, the dangerousness, the inhospitability of what it always was. And so again there is the sense of being caught in the coils of a rope.
The writer can’t quite put these different world-views and ideas of what’s wrong together, and so he shuttles backwards and forwards between them. There’s a moment when he observes young devotees of the ecstatic movement and they look to him like fallen angels at one moment and then at another moment they look like cardboard cutouts with no depth, no minds of their own, and it becomes difficult to work out which of these two impressions is worse, which is more frightening, which is more violent. And it comes to seem that it’s the cardboard cutout which is more the essential nature—the fake, the pretender, the con artist, the one-dimension figure … where “figure” has no poetic meaning, is just a template or a mould. And there’s something very compelling or worth thinking very carefully about, that what is to be noticed and feared isn’t the dark demonic spirit peeping out of the underworld—and there are other images of this same force. Other people think of it as a machine or as a monstrous creature. But what if it is the cardboard cutout which is the true menace?
And then there is the mental strain that comes from trying to adjust between these different views, where the more vividly/obviously frightening version, which is to say the demon/the phantom/the creature of darkness, is much easier to think about and therefore more comforting paradoxically than the empty, hollow, fake alternative.
And I keep thinking of a certain view of childhood and innocence, which is among other things an openness to every aspect of life, that precedes and doesn’t yet encompass these passions of the will and machinations of the society ruled or animated by lusts for control and emotional obligations/regulations. So whether or not this or that child or any child perceives the difference between their world and this other world, still the possibility exists of this innocent comprehension which is (to go back to the paradox) what in fact makes full the world and life which is otherwise defined by this law of violence.
What I’m saying is that there comes a point when somebody doesn’t feel that they can go on. Or there’s this terrible un-future in front of them. Whatever it is: maybe it’s a bright light, a holiday space, or maybe it’s a brick wall.
And his athlete’s watch with its orange strap measured the distance and his speed and let him control the music player to listen again to songs he loved when he was young.
[singing]
So I come back again and again to this picture and drama of the person caught in the place/the system and refusing its coercive control (or just control) and having to decide through trial and error, through painful failed confrontation, through escape attempts and dreams of escape; having to survive without getting out, or getting out and being able to see that through.
There is this puzzle and rabbit hole and you never quite know where it leads, if you can get to the bottom. And it’s better not to go down there I suppose.
This is the world I spend my time dreaming about: a world where we do indeed have to face an independence day so we finally see ourselves as inhabitants of planet earth, where Mother Nature is in charge of our borders as opposed to people creating our man-made ones. For all of us to be able to access therapeutic support, be it physical, emotional, mental or spiritual as and when we need it. A world where compassion, patience, time, courage and commitment (not to mention the funds) are available. For this to be the norm. And I’m going to keep on dreaming, screaming and believing, in order for this to become our new reality.
And so Joshua calls the people to Shechem. He calls them to this place called Shechem. Now Shechem was a very special place because Shechem was a covenantial place. Shechem was the place where God made his covenant with Abraham. Shechem was the place where Jacob, when he came back and sorted things out between him and his brother, it was where he told his people to bury all their false idols. Shechem was the place where Rachel was buried and where Rebekah was buried. It was the place where the children of Israel buried the bones of Joseph which they carried for forty years in the desert. Shechem was a covenantial place. And so he calls them to this place. But this is what I like about the verse: it says “and Joshua gathered all the tribes together”—the elders, the leaders, the Sabbath school superintendents—he called them all together and he said: “they gathered together” (listen to this) “and presented themselves before … God”. Not Joshua. He called them together and they presented themselves before God. Because when we come together in the house of God, we come to present ourselves before God. Because worship is not about a simple man just preaching a sermon or a praise-singer singing in harmony. It’s about presenting yourself before God! So when we come here to present ourselves we leave our egos at that door. When we come here to present ourselves before God we leave our agendas at the door. Am I speaking to someone here? When we come to present ourselves before God we leave our bad attitudes at the door.
Growth is often taken to be a linear concept but I don’t think that’s how it works in a kind of psychic/human way. Growth isn’t linear and I think gardening very much puts one in touch with the cyclical nature of growth: growth predicated on the idea of decay rather than operating in spite of it. I mean this guy over here is growing all his vegetables out of a great big mound of cocoa dregs, coffee granules that he gets from local shops and all that’s built up on piles of old wood. It’s called “Hugelkultur”, and it’s a very prominent German notion. It’s a variation on permaculture. So quite literally the rotting, the decaying wood and the recycled coffee granules form the basis of fertile ground upon which new things can grow.
Escape is not a complete act even if it’s possible. If you get out then there is this whole other dimension of for example guilt or regret, fear, and the sense that it might make matters worse, it might go wrong, that there was security in the mansion (the mansion with its labyrinth other dimension). Each failed escape and even the successful escape creates some new set of dilemmas. The word “escape” therefore needs to have this implication of … endlessness. It doesn’t necessarily take the escaper into some new labyrinth (though perhaps it might do), but it doesn’t take the escaper into a realm of happiness, relaxation, security. It’s the refusal of security once, for better or worse, security becomes intolerable.
[singing]
Anyway there’s this footage or audio, it gets confused in my mind which is the audio and which is the footage. And they make him sleep on the floor and he doesn’t have food. There’s video of him waking up and he makes his bed or tries to make his bed but he’s so weak he doesn’t know what he’s doing. But he has language, he has this extraordinary clarity of language. I guess he was six or seven or eight. You hear him saying—again, I couldn’t watch this more than once so maybe I remember it differently, but he says nobody loves me and then he says nobody feeds me.
In my mind I put these two videos together in terms of the clarity of the boy’s language. He can say—because he has no guilt—he can say what is happening. And it’s not the language of feelings. It’s not the language of pain. It’s the language of description.
It reminds me of a story from Auschwitz. When the Russians were coming to liberate Auschwitz, the Nazis force-marched the remaining prisoners. It was a death march, but they left behind the sick, and there was a boy there, a little boy, and no one knows his name. Primo Levi writes about him and gives him this name, which is something like Hurbinek. I don’t know how you pronounce it. There were children born in Auschwitz. And he is trying to speak. And there are these women there and Primo Levi says they were “too tender and too vain” to help him speak. But there’s a teenage boy there too who just keeps him company and, in the telling of it, he learns a word or two—or the shape of a word or two—which perhaps no-one really understands, and then he dies if I remember correctly but there’s this effort at language. This beautiful effort even in those circumstances to find some words.
[singing]